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The Vietnam seafood export target of 2018 has been identified to overcome the milestone of US$ 8.5 billion, towards US$ 9 billion. The seafood exporters are focusing on improving the quality of export products to achieve this goal.

Tuna processing for export. Picture: Thu Hoa.

Quality is top priority

According to Mr.Truong Dinh Hoe, General Secretary of the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP), it was certain that quality is the key factor for seafood exports. This was a vital factor and a driving force for development. When we have good and safe products, a good market share is certain. An advantage for the Vietnam's seafood export was that the European market had appreciated Vietnam's efforts to control antibiotics in its products, therefore, the European consumers came back to the Vietnamese seafood products, contributing to the overall growth of export turnover last year.

For the achieved results of 2017, shrimp commodity emerged as a phenomenon, bringing the amount of foreign currency to nearly US$3.8 billion. In particular, the shrimp processing products accounted for over 50%. This shows that the world market is attracted to value added items, and this continues to be the trend, so the Vietnamese can get a better price for the same unit of product. In fact, the Vietnamese shrimp is still very competitive with two main competitors, India and Thailand. However, Vietnam has many advantages in terms of process and processing technology due to methodical investment over a long time and promoting its effect. Meanwhile, the world market trend of shrimp products requires deep processing for added value, so that, with the current ability and position, Vietnam can now gain a dramatic market share.

According to Mr. Truong Dinh Hoe, the technical barriers from other countries were appearing constantly, affecting the export of Vietnamese seafood. In order to overcome these factors, it was important that Vietnam would still make efforts, and persevere in implementing the measures to minimize the negative impacts. In addition, the enterprises would still have the company of the Government, the ministries, and the branches in the process of solving the outstanding problems such as antibiotic chemicals, impurities, illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUU).

Expand the market

According to the leader of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Vietnam has better exploitation of the traditional markets such as the US and the EU, and the markets where Vietnam had advantages with the free trade agreements such as Australia, Korea, Japan. The major markets for Vietnam's seafood export were the United States, Japan, China and Korea, accounting for 55.3% of the total export value of fish and crustaceans. China was the market with the highest growth rate in 2017 with 64.4%. The Netherlands (48.6%), Great Britain (36.4%), South Korea (29.1%), Canada (22.3%) and Japan (20%).

Mr. Truong Dinh Hoe said that in addition to traditional markets, the Chinese market continued to be a good growth platform for the enterprises, but it was emphasized that the enterprises should not overlook export at all costs. It was necessary to assess properly the needs of the Chinese market to provide suitable products and should promote the official cross-border export to this market. In the US market, it was certain that the Vietnamese enterprises must create beliefs on quality to overcome its technical barriers.

For the management agencies, with the good implementation of the Fisheries Law, VASEP will continue to cooperate with other organizations to train and instruct the enterprises to comply with the law firmly to implement properly and tightly. Recently, at the seminar, “The note on the criminalization of the aquaculture production and businesses from 2018”, Assoc. Dr. Cao Thi Oanh, from the Hanoi Law University introduced the issues related to the Penal Code in 2015 (effective from 1/1/2018) to the enterprises that related directly to the operation of the aquaculture enterprises, such as: Identification and prevention methods (crime of tax evasion, crime of social insurance evasion, crime of illegal layoffs, environmental offenses, position offenses...) and more specially, offering the solutions to the enterprises that could solve the criminal problem in the seafood business...

“With the acquisition and efforts to solve these issues, the favorable conditions of the Vietnam-EU Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) was approved, and that has created a better legal framework and business environment for the exporters. Therefore, the target implementation of export turnover value over the milestone of US$ 8.5 billion can be achieved fully” – Mr. Truong Dinh Hoe affirmed.